Meaning of the word morphemes

A
morpheme is a segment of a word regularly recurrent in other words
and having the same meaning in all of its recurrences. Morphemes have
lexical, part-of-speech, differential and distributional meanings.

The
lexical meaning of roots.
Root morphemes possess a kind of generalized lexical meaning
which
differs
from that of affixes. The root-morpheme is the lexical nucleus of the
word; it has a very general and abstract lexical meaning common to a
set of semantically related words constituting one word-cluster, e.g.
(to)
teach,
teacher,
teaching.

The
meaning of affixes.
The meaning of affixes is purely sinificative. For example, the
suffix —en
carries the meaning ‘the change of quality’. Verbs formed with
the help of this suffix express the idea that someone or something
has more of a quality than it had previously. If, for example, a
river deepens,
it becomes deeper
than it was before, and if something strengthens
a person or group, they become more powerful and secure, or more
likely to succeed.

As
in words the meaning in morphemes may also be analyzed into
denotational and connotational components. For example, endearing and
diminutive suffixes, such as -ette
(kitchenette,
luncheonette);
—ie
(y)
(dearie,
girlie);
-ling (duckling,
wolfling)
bear
a heavy emotive charge. Morphemes —ly,
-like,
-ish
in the words womanly,
womanlike,
womanish
have the same denotational meaning of similarity but differ in the
connotational component (cf. the Russian equivalents: женственный
– женский
– бабий).

The
differential meaning
is the semantic component that serves to distinguish one word from
other in words containing the same (identical) morphemes. For
example, in the word note-book
the morpheme note-
serves to distinguish the word from other words: exercise-book,
copy-book,
bookshelf,
bookcase.

The
distributional meaning
is found in all words having more than one morpheme. It is found in
the arrangement and order of morphemes making up the word. For
example, the word teacher
is composed of two morphemes teach-
and —er
both of which possess the denotational meaning – ‘to give
instruction or lessons’ and ‘the doer of the action’. A
different arrangement of the same morphemes *erteach
would make the word meaningless.
More examples, playboy
– boy-play,
pot flower – flowerpot,
board school – school board.

The
part-of-speech (functional)
meaning
is indicative of the part of speech to which a derivational word
belongs. If we see the words with the suffixes -ment,
-er,
-ity,
-or,
we say that they are nouns, e.g. establishment,
plurality,
teacher,
translator,
sailor.
If -ful,
-less,
-able,
-al
etc. are present in words we say the words are adjectives, e.g.
helpful,
handless,
guiltless,
readable,
national,
writable,
operational,
openable,
proposal.

Pseudo-morpheme
– is a morpheme which has a differential and distributional meaning
but doesn’t possess any lexical or part-of-speech meaning.
For example, in the words retain,
detain,
contain
and receive,
deceive,
conceive,
the clusters re-,
de-,
con-
(having nothing in common with the phonetically identical prefixes
re-,
de- in
the words rewrite,
reorganize,
deodorize,
decode)
and

—tain,
-ceive
have no lexical meaning. However they have a differential meaning
because re-
distinguishes retain
from detain,
and —tain
distinguishes retain
from receive.
They also have a distributional meaning as their order points at the
affixal status of re-,
de-,
con-
and makes one understand —tain,
-ceive
as roots. But as they lack any lexical meaning of their own, they can
be characterizes as pseudo-morphemes. There to approaches to the
problem. Some linguists recognize pseudo-morphemes and regard word
like retain,
detain,
receive,
deceive as
polymorphic derived (affixed) words; others do not recognize
pseudo-morphemes and treat these words as monomorphic.

Unique
root
is a pseudo-morpheme since it has no lexical meaning, but it carries
a differential meaning and a distributional meaning that doesn’t
occur in other words, whereas is a word, containing a unique root,
other morphemes display a more or less clear lexical meaning, e.g.
hamlet,
cranberry,
gooseberry,
mulberry,
comet.

There’s
a close connection between the type of meaning in morphemes and the
type of morphemic segmentability. A great number of words are
characterized by complete
segmentability.
In this case individual morphemes clearly stand out within the word
and can be easily isolated, their meaning is transparent, e.g.
endless,
useless.
Conditional
segmentability
is typical for words whose component morphemes are pseudo-morphemes.
Defective
segmentability
is the property of words whose component morphemes are unique ones.

There are two levels of
approach to the study of word-structure: the level of morphemic
analysis and the level of derivational (or word-formation) analysis.

If
the analysis is limited to stating the number and the types of
morphemes that make up a word, it is referred to as morphemic.
For example, the word underestimates
may
be analyzed into four morphemes: the root —estim-,
the prefix under-,
lexical suffix —ate
and grammatical suffix —s.
The morphemic analysis establishes the morphemes that make up the
word, regardless of their role in the formation of this word. In
other words, the morphemic analysis only defines the morphemes (their
number and types) comprising a word, but doesn’t reveal their
hierarchy.

The
morphemic structure of the word is being established by the method of
immediate
constituents analysis.
This method is based on a binary principle which means that at each
stage the word is broken into the components (immediate
constituents)
after that these components are broken further into two other
components. When the components can’t be further divided and the
analysis is completed we have arrived at the ultimate
constituents
– the morphemic structure of the word. For example, the morphemic
structure of the word
underestimates can
be represented as a linear structure
in
the following way:
W=
{[Pr +(R+L)]+Gr}, or as a hierarchical structure of Immediate
Constituents (Diagram 13).

Diagram
13.

Word

St
₁(underestimate-) Gr.
Suf. (-s)

Pref
(under-)
St ₂(-estimate)

R
(estim-)
Lex. Suf.(-ate)

Derivational
analysis
studies the structural patterns and rules on which words are built.
Analyzing the word-formation structure of a word one tries to answer
the question: What was formed from what? One studies the last
word-formation act, the result of which is this or that unit. For
example, in the word Oxbridgian
the last word formation act was suffixation (Oxbridge
+ -ian),
but in the previous word-formation act telescoping took place (Oxford
+ Cambridge).
The verb to
dognap
is back formation from the word dognapping
which
was
formed by analogy with kidnapping.

The
nature, type and arrangement of the ICs (immediate constituent –
непосредственная составляющая) of the
word is known as its derivative
structure.
Though the derivative structure of the word is closely connected with
its morphemic structure and often coincides with it, it differs from
it in principle.

According
to the derivative structure all words fall into two big classes:
simplexes or simple, non-derived words and complexes or derivatives.
Simplexes
are words which derivationally cannot be segmented into ICs. The
morphological stem of simple words, i.e. the part of the word which
takes on the system of grammatical inflections is semantically
non-motivated and independent of other words, e.g. hand,
come,
blue.
Derivatives
are words which depend on some other simpler lexical items that
motivate them structurally and semantically, i.e. the meaning and the
structure of the derivative is understood through the comparison with
the meaning and the structure of the source word. Hence derivatives
are secondary, motivated units, made up as a rule of two ICs, i.e.
binary units, e.g. words like friendliness,
unwifely,
school-masterish,
etc. The ICs are brought together according to specific rules of
order and arrangement preconditioned by the system of the language.
It follows that all derivatives are marked by the fixed order of
their ICs.

The basic elementary units of
the derivational structure of words are: derivational bases,
derivational affixes and derivational patterns.

The
derivational base
– is the part of the word from which the word was built. Types of
derivational bases:

• bases
  that coincide with morphological stems – dutiful,
  dutifully;

—
bases that coincide with grammatical word-forms – unknown;

—
bases the coincide with word-groups – second-rateness.

Derivational
affixes
are ICs of the derived word in all parts of speech. Derivational
affixes are highly selective (the choice depends on etymological,
phonological, semantic and structural properties of the base):
blacken,
scribbler,
novelist,
befriend,
enslave,
brainless.

The
derivational pattern
– is a regular meaningful arrangement, a structure that imposes
rigid rules on the order and the nature of the derivational bases and
affixes which may be brought together. According to structural
formulas all words may be classified into: 1) suffixal derivatives:
blackness;
2) prefixal derivatives: rewrite;
3) conversions: a cut;
4) compound words: music-lover.
Structural patterns specify the base classes and individual affixes
thus indicating the lexico-grammatical and lexical classes of derived
words. The affixes refer derivatives to specific parts of speech and
lexical subsets. For example, the derivational pattern noun
+ -ish → Adjective
signals a set of adjectives with the lexical meaning of resemblance,
e.g. girlish,
whereas adjective
+ -ish → Adjective
signals adjectives meaning a small degree of quality, e.g.
blackish.

Derivational
relations are distinguished into:

—
derivative clusters – a set of derivatives that can be formed from
the same derivative base (friendship,
friendly,
unfriendly);

—
derivative row – is made up by the derivatives that represent
consecutive steps of the derivative from the initial derivative base
(friend
– friendly – unfriendly – unfriendliness);

— derivative categories –
comprises derivations of different derivative patterns brought
together by the same generalized derivative meanings:

(Teacher) N=V+er

(Historian) N=N+an

(Activist) N=Adj+ist

(Author) N=N+or.

It
should be taken into consideration that the word-building meaning
which often depends on the affixal meaning or the number of bases is
not the same with the lexical meaning. For example, the word-building
meaning of the word writer
is ‘a  person or thing that performs an action specified by
the derivational base’. The lexical meaning reveals the character
of the action – a writer is ‘a person who writes’. The
word-building meaning unites words, derived according to the same
word-building model with the same semantic consequence, e.g.
brainstorming
and
blamestorming.
The group of words united by the same lexical meaning numbers words
built up according to different word-building patterns and entering
synonymic relation.

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Morphology is the study of words, word formation, and the relationship between words. In Morphology, we look at morphemes — the smallest lexical items of meaning. Studying morphemes helps us to understand the meaning, structure, and etymology (history) of words.

Inflectional affixes only modify the meaning of words instead of changing them. This means they modify the words by making them plural, comparative or superlative, or by changing the verb tense.

Word class	Modification reason	Suffixes
To modify nouns	Plural & possessive forms	-s (or -es), -‘s (or s’)
To modify adjectives	Comparative & superlative forms	-er, -est
To modify verbs	3rd person singular, past tense, present & past participles	-s, -ed, -ing, -en

In English, regular verbs use the past tense morpheme -ed; this shows us that the verb happened in the past. The pronunciation of this morpheme changes its sound according to the last consonant of the verb but always keeps its past tense function. This is an example of an allomorph.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not to be confused with Morphine.

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression.^[1] The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.

In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are considered roots (such as the morpheme cat); other morphemes, called affixes, are found only in combination with other morphemes. For example, the -s in cats indicates the concept of plurality but is always bound to another concept to indicate a specific kind of plurality.^[2]

This distinction is not universal and does not apply to, for example, Latin, in which many roots cannot stand alone. For instance, the Latin root reg- (‘king’) must always be suffixed with a case marker: rex (reg-s), reg-is, reg-i, etc. For a language like Latin, a root can be defined as the main lexical morpheme of a word.

These sample English words have the following morphological analyses:

• «Unbreakable» is composed of three morphemes: un- (a bound morpheme signifying «not»), break (the root, a free morpheme), and -able (a bound morpheme signifying «an ability to be done»).^[3][4][5]
• The plural morpheme for regular nouns (-s) has three allomorphs: it is pronounced /s/ (e.g., in cats ), /ɪz, əz/ (e.g., in dishes ), and /z/ (e.g., in dogs ), depending on the pronunciation of the root.

Classification[edit]

Free and bound morphemes[edit]

Every morpheme can be classified as free or bound:^[6]

• Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear within lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).
• Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root and sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un- appears only when accompanied by other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in English are affixes, specifically prefixes and suffixes. Examples of suffixes are -tion, -sion, -tive, -ation, -ible, and -ing. Bound morphemes that are not affixed are called cranberry morphemes.

Classification of bound morphemes[edit]

Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional morphemes. The main difference between them is their function in relation to words.

Derivational bound morphemes[edit]

• Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change the semantic meaning or the part of speech of the affected word. For example, in the word happiness, the addition of the bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness). In the word unkind, un- functions as a derivational morpheme since it inverts the meaning of the root morpheme (word) kind. Generally, morphemes that affix (i.e., affixes) to a root morpheme (word) are bound morphemes.

Inflectional bound morphemes[edit]

• Inflectional morphemes modify the tense, aspect, mood, person, or number of a verb or the number, gender, or case of a noun, adjective, or pronoun without affecting the word’s meaning or class (part of speech). Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited. An inflectional morpheme changes the form of a word. English has eight inflections.^[7][8]

Allomorphs[edit]

Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme that differ in form but are semantically similar. For example, the English plural marker has three allomorphs: /-z/ (bugs), /-s/ (bats), or /-ɪz, -əz/ (buses). An allomorph is a concrete realization of a morpheme, which is an abstract unit. That is parallel to the relation of an allophone and a phoneme.

Zero-bound-morpheme[edit]

Zero-morpheme[edit]

This section needs expansion with: at least a proper definition of the term. You can help by adding to it. (December 2019)

A zero-morpheme is a type of morpheme that carries semantic meaning but is not represented by auditory phoneme. A word with a zero-morpheme is analyzed as having the morpheme for grammatical purposes, but the morpheme is not realized in speech. They are often represented by /∅/ within glosses.^[9]

Generally, such morphemes have no visible changes. For instance, sheep is both the singular and the plural forms; rather than taking the usual plural suffix -s to form hypothetical *sheeps, the plural is analyzed as being composed of sheep + -∅, the null plural suffix. The intended meaning is thus derived from the co-occurrence determiner (in this case, «some-» or «a-«).^[10]

In some cases, a zero-morpheme may also be used to contrast with other inflected forms of a word that contain an audible morpheme. For example, the plural noun cats in English consists of the root cat and the plural suffix -s, and so the singular cat may be analyzed as the root inflected with the null singular suffix —∅.^[11]

Content vs. function[edit]

Content morphemes express a concrete meaning or content, and function morphemes have more of a grammatical role. For example, the morphemes fast and sad can be considered content morphemes. On the other hand, the suffix -ed is a function morpheme since it has the grammatical function of indicating past tense.

Both categories may seem very clear and intuitive, but the idea behind them is occasionally more difficult to grasp since they overlap with each other.^[12] Examples of ambiguous situations are the preposition over and the determiner your, which seem to have concrete meanings but are considered function morphemes since their role is to connect ideas grammatically.^[13] Here is a general rule to determine the category of a morpheme:

• Content morphemes include free morphemes that are nouns, adverbs, adjectives, and verbs and include bound morphemes that are bound roots and derivational affixes.^[13]
• Function morphemes may be free morphemes that are prepositions, pronouns, determiners, and conjunctions. They may be bound morphemes that are inflectional affixes.^[13]

Other features[edit]

Roots are composed of only one morpheme, but stems can be composed of more than one morpheme. Any additional affixes are considered morphemes. For example, in the word quirkiness, the root is quirk, but the stem is quirky, which has two morphemes.

Moreover, some pairs of affixes have identical phonological form but different meanings. For example, the suffix -er can be either derivational (e.g. sell ⇒ seller) or inflectional (e.g. small ⇒ smaller). Such morphemes are called homophonous.^[13]

Some words might seem to be composed of multiple morphemes but are not. Therefore, not only form but also meaning must be considered when identifying morphemes. For example, the word Madagascar is long and might seem to have morphemes like mad, gas, and car, but it does not. Conversely, some short words have multiple morphemes (e.g. dogs = dog + s).^[13]

Morphological icons[edit]

Morphological icons are images, patterns or symbols that relate to a specific morpheme.^[14] For children with dyslexia, it has been shown to be an effective way of building up a word. The word ‘inviting’ as an example is made up of two commonly used morphemes, ‘in-‘ and ‘-ing’. A morphological icon for ‘in-‘ could be an arrow going into a cup, and ‘-ing’ could be an arrow going forward to symbolise that something is in action (as in being, running, fishing).

The concept of combining visual aid icons with morpheme teaching methods was pioneered from the mid 1980s by Neville Brown.^[15] He founded the Maple Hayes school for dyslexia in 1981, where he later improved the method alongside his son, Daryl Brown. The school’s curriculum uses morphological icons as a learning aid.^[16]

Morphological analysis[edit]

In natural language processing for Japanese, Chinese, and other languages, morphological analysis is the process of segmenting a sentence into a row of morphemes. Morphological analysis is closely related to part-of-speech tagging, but word segmentation is required for those languages because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces.^[17]

The purpose of morphological analysis is to determine the minimal units of meaning in a language (morphemes) by comparison of similar forms: such as by comparing forms such as «She is walking» and «They are walking» with each other, rather than either with something less similar like «You are reading.» Those forms can be effectively broken down into parts, and the different morphemes can be distinguished.

Both meaning and form are equally important for the identification of morphemes. An agent morpheme is an affix like -er that in English transforms a verb into a noun (e.g. teach → teacher). English also has another morpheme that is identical in pronunciation (and written form) but has an unrelated meaning and function: a comparative morpheme that changes an adjective into another degree of comparison (but remains the same adjective) (e.g. small → smaller). The opposite can also occur: a pair of morphemes with identical meaning but different forms.^[13]

Changing definitions[edit]

In generative grammar, the definition of a morpheme depends heavily on whether syntactic trees have morphemes as leaves or features as leaves.

• Direct surface-to-syntax mapping in lexical functional grammar (LFG) – leaves are words
• Direct syntax-to-semantics mapping
  • Leaves in syntactic trees spell out morphemes: distributed morphology – leaves are morphemes
  • Branches in syntactic trees spell out morphemes: radical minimalism and nanosyntax – leaves are «nano-» (small) morpho-syntactic features

Given the definition of a morpheme as «the smallest meaningful unit,» nanosyntax aims to account for idioms in which an entire syntactic tree often contributes «the smallest meaningful unit.» An example idiom is «Don’t let the cat out of the bag.» There, the idiom is composed of «let the cat out of the bag.» That might be considered a semantic morpheme, which is itself composed of many syntactic morphemes. Other cases of the «smallest meaningful unit» being longer than a word include some collocations such as «in view of» and «business intelligence» in which the words, when together, have a specific meaning.

The definition of morphemes also plays a significant role in the interfaces of generative grammar in the following theoretical constructs:

• Event semantics: the idea that each productive morpheme must have a compositional semantic meaning (a denotation), and if the meaning is there, there must be a morpheme (whether null or overt).
• Spell-out: the interface with which syntactic/semantic structures are «spelled out» by using words or morphemes with phonological content. That can also be thought of as lexical insertion into the syntactic.

See also[edit]

• Alternation (linguistics)
• Bound morpheme
• Floating tone
• Greek morphemes
• Hybrid word
• Morphological parsing
• Morphophonology
• Morphotactics
• Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, featuring a comparable concept in folklore studies
• Phoneme
• Theoretical linguistics
• Word stem

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Glossary of reading terms
• Comprehensive and searchable morpheme reference
• Linguistics 001 — Lecture 7 — Morphology by Prof. Mark Lieberman
• Pronunciation of the word morpheme

Definition

A «morpheme» is a short segment of language that meets three basic criteria:

1. It is a word or a part of a word that has meaning.

2. It cannot be divided into smaller meaningful segments without changing its meaning or leaving a meaningless remainder.

3. It has relatively the same stable meaning in different verbal environments.

Free and Bound Morphemes

There are two types of morphemes-free morphemes and bound morphemes. «Free morphemes» can stand alone with a specific meaning, for example, eat, date, weak. «Bound morphemes» cannot stand alone with meaning. Morphemes are comprised of two separate classes called (a) bases (or roots) and (b) affixes.

A «base,» or «root» is a morpheme in a word that gives the word its principle meaning. An example of a «free base» morpheme is woman in the word womanly. An example of a «bound base» morpheme is -sent in the word dissent.

Affixes

An «affix» is a bound morpheme that occurs before or after a base. An affix that comes before a base is called a «prefix.» Some examples of prefixes are ante-, pre-, un-, and dis-, as in the following words:

antedate
prehistoric
unhealthy
disregard

An affix that comes after a base is called a «suffix.» Some examples of suffixes are -ly, -er, -ism, and -ness, as in the following words:

happily
gardener
capitalism
kindness

Derivational Affixes

An affix can be either derivational or inflectional. «Derivational affixes» serve to alter the meaning of a word by building on a base. In the examples of words with prefixes and suffixes above, the addition of the prefix un- to healthy alters the meaning of healthy. The resulting word means «not healthy.» The addition of the suffix -er to garden changes the meaning of garden, which is a place where plants, flowers, etc., grow, to a word that refers to ‘a person who tends a garden.’ It should be noted that all prefixes in English are derivational. However, suffixes may be either derivational or inflectional.

Inflectional Affixes

There are a large number of derivational affixes in English. In contrast, there are only eight «inflectional affixes» in English, and these are all suffixes. English has the following inflectional suffixes, which serve a variety of grammatical functions when added to specific types of words. These grammatical functions are shown to the right of each suffix.

-s     noun plural
-‘s     noun possessive
-s     verb present tense third person singular
-ing     verb present participle/gerund
-ed     verb simple past tense
-en     verb past perfect participle
-er     adjective comparative
-est     adjective superlative

MORPHEMES

1. Definition of Morpheme

The term morpheme is used to refer to the smallest, indivisible units of semantic content or grammatical function which word are made up. The word morpheme is derived from the root morph.

• The suffix in morphemes is –eme ; it is something related to minimal distinctive unit. That is the smallest unit that can be distinguished in some system of classification.

The root of the word comes from Greek word ‘morphe’ which means form or shape.

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language that can not be divided into a small unit. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is a freestanding unit of meaning. Every word comprises one or more morphemes.

1. Types of Morphemes

In generally, types of morphemes can be divided into two kinds of morphemes. The first one is free morpheme and other one is bound morpheme.

1. 1.      Free morphemes

Free morphemes can stand by themselves (i.e. they are what we conventionally call words) and either tell us something about the world (free lexical morphemes) or play a role in grammar (free grammatical morphemes). Man, pizza, run and happy are instances of free lexical morphemes, while and, but, the and to are examples for free grammatical morphemes. It is important to note the difference between morphemes and phonemes: morphemes are the minimal meaning-bearing elements that a word consists of and are principally independent from sound. For example, the word zebra (ˈziːbrə) consists of six phones and two syllables, but it contains only a single morpheme. Ze– and -bra are not independent meaning-bearing components of the word zebra, making it monomorphemic. (Bra as a free morpheme does in fact mean something in English, but this meaning is entirely unrelated to the -bra in zebra.).

1. 2.      Bound morphemes

Not all morphemes can be used independently, however. Some need to be bound to a free morpheme. In English the information “plural number” is attached to a word that refers to some person, creature, concept or other nameable entity (in other words, to a noun) when encoded in a morpheme and cannot stand alone. Similarly the morpheme -er, used to describe “someone who performs a certain activity” (e.g. a dancer, a teacher or a baker) cannot stand on its own, but needs to be attached to a free morpheme (a verb in this case). Bound morphemes come in two varieties, derivational and inflectional, the core difference between the two being that the addition of derivational morphemes creates new words while the addition of inflectional words merely changes word form.

1. a.      Derivational morphemes

The signature quality of derivational morphemes is that they derive new words. In the following examples, derivational morphemes are added to produce new words which are derived from the parent word.

happy – happiness – unhappiness

frost – defrost – defroster

examine – examination – reexamination

In all cases the derived word means something different than the parent and the word class may change with each derivation. As demonstrated in the examples above, sometimes derivation will not cause the world class to change, but in such a case the meaning will usually be significantly different from that of the parent word, often expressing opposition or reversal.

probable – improbable

visible – invisible

tie – untie

create – recreate

Independently of whether or not word class changes and how significantly meaning is affected, derivation always creates (derives) new words from existing ones, while inflection is limited to changing word form.

1. b.      Inflectional morphemes

Inflection (the process by which inflectional morphemes are attached to words) allows speakers to morphologically encode grammatical information. That may sound much more complicated than it really is – recall the example we started out with.

The word girls consists of two morphemes

• the free lexical morpheme girl that describes a young female human being and
• the bound inflectional morpheme -s that denotes plural number

Examples for the morphological encoding of other grammatical categories are tense (past tense -ed as in walked), aspect (progressive aspect as in walking),case (genitive case as in Mike‘s car) and person (third person -s as in Mike drives a Toyota).

You are likely to notice that

• overall, English grammar has fairly few inflections and
• some inflectional endings can signify different things and more than one piece of grammatical information at once

The first point can easily be demonstrated by comparing English with German, which makes more use of inflection. Compare the following two pairs of sentences.

Der Mann sah den Hund

Den Hund sah der Mann

vs.

The man saw the dog

The dog saw the man

If you focus on the meaning of the two German sentences you’ll see that it does not change, even though we’ve changed the word order. The man is still the one who sees the dog, not the other way around. By contrast, the English expression changes its meaning from the first to the second sentence.

Why is this the case? In the German example the definite article is inflected for accusative case (den Hund), telling us who exactly did what to whom. This allows us to play around with the word order without changing the meaning of the sentence. English gives us no way of doing the same. We are forced to stick to a fixed word order due to a lack of case inflection (except for personal pronouns). Languages such as Latin that indicate a high degree of grammatical information via inflection (so-called synthetic languages) generally have a free word order than analytic languages like English which have only reasonably very few inflections and rely on word order to signal syntactic relations (another popular example for a strongly analytic language is Chinese).

Affixes

Linguists use the term affix to describe where exactly a bound morpheme is attached to a word. Prefixes are attached at the onset of a free morpheme, while suffixes are attached to the end. Infixes – affixes that occur in the middle of a word – are very rare in English, a well-known exception being expletive infixation. While in English suffixes can be either derivational or inflectional (teacher, slowly vs. apples, kicked), prefixes are always derivational (untie,recover, defrost).

Fifteen Common Prefixes

The following tables and tip are adopted from Grammar and Composition by Mary Beth Bauer, et al.

Prefix	Meaning
ad-	to, toward
circum-	around, about
com-	with, together
de-	away from, off
dis-	away, apart
ex-	from, out
in-	Not
in-	in, into
inter-	Between
mis-	Wrong
post-	After
re-	back, again
sub-	beneath, under
trans-	Across
un-	Not

Ten Common Suffixes

Suffix	Meaning
-able (-ible)	capable of being
-ance (-ence)	the act of
-ate	making or applying
-ful	full of
-ity	the state of being
-less	Without
-ly	in a certain way
-ment	the result of being
-ness	the state of being
-tion (-ion, -sion)	the act of or the state of being

Tip

Suffixes can also be used to tell the part of speech of a word.  The following examples show the parts of speech indicated by the suffixes in the chart.

Nouns:  -ance, -ful, -ity, -ment, -ness, -tion

Verb:  -ate

Adjectives:  -able, -ful, -less, -ly

Adverb:  -ly

Morphs, morphemes, allomorphs

When you look at certain inflectional endings that occur in English, you’ll notice that they are often but not always predictable. Here are a few examples for the plural morpheme.

one car – two cars; one rose – two roses…

but

one mouse – two mice

one man – two men

one ox – two oxen

one sheep – two sheep

A vowel change (also called an umlaut plural) instead of a suffix marks the plural in mice and men, in oxen the suffix we encounter is rather exotic (meaning this word is virtually the only one that takes the -en ending) and in the last example there is no visible plural marking at all.

The fact that plural number in English can be marked with several different inflectional suffixes (-s, -en), by vowel change or by no (visible) change at all points to a distinction you already know from phonology:

Morphs

a concrete part of a word that cannot be divided into smaller parts

morphemes
the meaning-distinguishing, abstract dimension of morphs, e.g. something like the plural morpheme

allomorphs
different realizations of the the same morpheme, e.g. -s, -en and nothing for the plural morpheme in dogs, oxen and fish_

When linguists talk about the allomorphs of the plural morpheme they are referring to variants of the same functional element which do not impact meaning in any way. A plural is still a plural, whether encoded by -s or something else.

Base, stem and root

Finally, in order to make the segmentation of words into smaller parts a little clearer, we differentiate between the base, the stem and the root of a word in morphological terms.

base: reactions

stem: reaction (s)

root: (re) act (ion) (s)

The stem is the base with all inflectional suffixes removed, whereas the root is what remains after all affixes have been taken off. When doing computational text analysis stemming (i.e. removing all inflectional endings) is frequently undertaken in order to avoid counting different word forms (e.g. house andhouses) as separate words.